Every piece of content in my media library was paid for/legally acquired.
I go through some stupid lengths (probably a few thousand hours of my life by now, from buying media from eBay, old library collections, closed movie stores, then ripping everything) to make it so.
I have so many dvds... so many. i have 5 Vaultz cases full, plus a bunch of 4 per flipped page "CD wallets" that friends have given me over the years. Plus box sets of entire runs of stuff like NYPD Blue, Quantum Leap, Batman, Ghostbusters, Law and Order, Buffy, Firefly, Seinfeld... I must have well over 1000 dvds by this point, and maybe 1/4th are on my NAS and available through VLC on amazon firestick, android, whatever. I got sick of kodi taking 5+ minutes to boot and be ready to play files, and intermittent networking issues. spent like $70 on an android TV box and a firestick and that solved that. Kid watches beakman, bill nye, bob ross, invader zim.
If you're patient and know the places media hoarders haunt, you can find dvds for pennies on the dollar. I'm sad all three pawn shops near me closed, because i picked up so much media at those places. There's a couple of other places that have used media, so i started going there 2 or 3 times a year.
I have banker boxes full of Audio CDs in jewel cases in an air conditioned shed. At some point streaming is going to be either so full of ads you may as well just get siriusXM and not have to deal with spotify anymore for audio, and you'll need $300 worth of streaming to keep up with the new hotness in television and moopies. Or, you can be like us, and keep the old stuff alive, and watch that, and discuss that.
You might find the older stuff doesn't make you feel bad, doesn't give you a headache, and will just feel like "home".
I pre-gamed this whole "AI content creation" ramp-up by decades.
I have a music library that I also like to keep 'clean', but it really is a lot of work over and above the, uhhh, alternatives. As such, it's quite the small library, but I look at it as concentrated quality.
Software tagged as "no longer available" is due to New York federal court by AACS group legal action in later March, 2014.[12] Remaining existing US software have disabled the decrypt / unencrypted / de-lock feature that allows bypass the Blu-ray disc protections. As from October, 2014 ... able to decrypt Blu-ray disc protection as being are freeware applications.
You can pretend to ignore the DMCA if you want, but I cannot believe that all of your DVDs and Blu-rays were unencrypted and unencumbered by any DRM before your ripping software used leaked/cracked keys to decrypt them and reassemble them without it.
The DMCA is a morally bankrupt law whose only purpose is to engage in economic protectionism. You know it, the media industry knows it, Congress knows it, and so does everyone else. Citing it as an example of why the content is "dangerous" or "harmful" is a very poor argument indeed.
This is such a terrible fiasco. You know, I chose to criticize the one video that Jeff singled out as offending. And Jeff has a lot of great content on his channel. Jeff has good and fun DIY projects. Jeff has also said that he is supporting his family, feeding his children, paying for health insurance and medical bills with the earnings from YouTube. This is a legitimate line of work, and Jeff is honestly doing what he can in good faith. Jeff is open to complying with the rules on YouTube, if he knew what they are and they didn't subtly change all the time (he released that video last year!)
And seeing that Jeff is 100% honest with his endeavors there and promoting his channel, rather than choosing a life of crime, or taking wages under-the-table, or abandoning his spouse and children... he chose a virtuous way. But what is HN telling Jeff?
HN is telling Jeff that his entire ecosystem is irredeemably evil. These fundamental protections that Jeff enjoys, the ones that get him paid, those are abominations and must be destroyed. That YouTube is wrong, DMCA is wrong, advertisements must be blocked, advertisers are pure, unadulterated greed incarnate; that copyright has gone too far, that anyone should be able to grab Jeff's videos off YouTube without being offended by an advertisement or a paid sponsor.
So do you want Jeff to feed his family or not? If you want to burn it all down and leave Jeff unemployed? Is that the undercurrent we are feeling here? You have come out against YouTube as if against a band of robbers, and Jeff feels abused and used and exploited right now, but still Jeff tells us that he's legally earning an income, and he's deriving that income from the infrastructure and legal framework that Hacker News hates with a white-hot hatred.
So that's an overwhelming tsunami of cognitive dissonance for this self-righteous keyboard warrior tonight.
Seems like you're arguing that Jeff wouldn't make money from his channel if the DMCA simply didn't exist at all. I think that's a bit of a stretch. We were discussing his ripping of Bluray discs, which is why DMCA is mentioned.
People are free to rip their purchased media. He even says that he buys blurays/dvds in the article.
One can assume anything, but a completely legal setup can look exactly like that. Especially as most of those are relatively old movies - looking like a list of purchased blurays/dvds to me.
It's entirely possible to populate a media tree of movies and shows with stub zero length files, just the formally named movie or tv episode names, and have Kodi and other other media managers download all the meta data (posters, descriptions, cast, etc) to sideload in the media tree or maintain in their own internal databases.
It's useful for testing and debugging media software in addition to being a great way to browse through all the films with ActorX or all the movies in a genre or a year.
You get the same visuals flipping through Kodi with and only lack something happening when you press play (unless you populate with named files that all hardlink to that Rick Astley music video).
I think they're just a media collector. I do the same thing. I have 48TB of storage in a ZFS pool for my media rips. I couldn't share them even if I wanted to, my 4K bluray rips are like 80GB a pop. My internet isn't that good.
Heaven forbid someone want to put their media collection onto redundant storage instead of cheap plastic discs with a questionable shelf life.
In fact, in my own house, for multiple decades, I've purchased physical media (CDs, DVDs, and more recently, Blu-Rays), and only have legally-acquired content on my NAS.
is contrary to your bold assertion:
> there are so many screenshots that indicate he is indulging in his own piracy activities.
It's unclear to me how to differentiate twixt pirated movies and movies ripped from legally purchased BluRays and DVDs .. on the basis of a Kodi screenshot with folder art sourced from theTVDB, IMDB, and theMovieDB (also fanart, etc sites).